When rhetoric tips into violence

There is perhaps nothing more depressing than watching the same narrative unfold in country after country, with the same outcome. The murder of Labour MP Jo Cox in West Yorkshire is one of these familiar moments. It will change the discussion around Britain’s coming referendum on its EU membership and have deep repercussions on the way Britain sees itself.

But it is also much more than that. It is a sign Europe is changing in ways both frightening and increasingly brutal.

Mainstream media outlets have placed the blame on the poisonous narrative politicians like UKIP's Nigel Farage have used to build their campaign in favor of Brexit. The Leave campaign has been accused of stirring up hatred and xenophobia to such a degree that it prompted the murder of an MP who has publicly campaigned for Britain to do more for refugees. Indeed it would be cowardly to disassociate the attack from what Jo Cox stood for. The well has been poisoned. The barely concealed violence inherent in blood and soil nationalism of the kind we’ve seen in Britain lately, almost inevitably turned into violent action. Like this, racism has become more obvious and aggressive in the U.K., and in England especially, making Cox and people like her, obvious targets.

If we allow irresponsible populists to fan the fires of hatred, the results are sadly predictable.

But we should dig a little deeper. There is nothing exceptional about Cox's murder, and nothing mystifying about the reasons behind it. It is, unfortunately, not surprising that a xenophobic, nationalistic narrative ends in violence. What is surprising is that we still act surprised.

Before Jo Cox there was Clément Méric in France and Pavlos Fyssas, the anti-fascist rapper who was murdered in Greece. Many others have died at the hands of neo-fascist thugs elsewhere in Europe. And a 2015 study suggests that violence coming from the far right has surpassed that caused by home-grown jihadis in the United States. Attributing these acts to mental illness, lone wolves or whatever description we’re using to pussyfoot around the fact that this was a politically motivated assassination, is a mistake. By skirting the issue, we fail to get at the heart of the issues that drive someone to commit murder.

There is a legitimate debate to be had on the U.K.’s membership of the EU. But it's time to avoid the campaign's core message. Nigel Farage unveiled the Leave campaign's promotional material hours before the fatal attack on Jo Cox. It depicted a column of refugees with the words “Breaking Point” on it.

This material reflects Nazi propaganda to an alarming degree, but that's sadly nothing new for Europe or indeed the U.K. Columnists in national newspapers have called refugees cockroaches and called for gunships to sink the boats crossing the Mediterranean. Politicians promise to curb migration but opt for refugee-bashing instead of providing real solutions — thereby legitimizing the far right.

If you constantly tell people they are under threat, someone will act on it.

U.K. is not alone in witnessing these astonishing acts of political blindness: In the West and in Europe more specifically, the indulgence of nationalistic, xenophobic narratives has reached new heights. Politicians like Farage in the U.K., Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, Marine Le Pen in France, and Donald Trump in the U.S. use real grievances in the electorate to push the boundaries of acceptable speech a bit further to the extreme right. Centrist politicians then try to win over some of the people they feel they have lost to the populist right. When Greek ex-Prime Minister Antonis Samaras called migrants “tyrants” who “occupy our cities” he was doing exactly that.

If you constantly tell people they are under threat, someone will act on it. It’s not a "bug" that perpetrators seem to suffer from mental health problems, it’s a "feature" that the far right appeals to and exploits.

Legitimate grievances with their roots in austerity, de-investment, globalization, crumbling public infrastructure and services are never addressed. Only misguided nationalistic tendencies in parts of the electorate are indulged.

This fantastic showcase of naivety — and insult to the class that’s always been at the forefront of anti-fascist struggles — comes down to two main issues. One is that it's easier to talk hot air about immigrants coming over to take your country than actually admitting you can’t have low taxes and keep your great public services. British Conservatives and other parties across Europe have been saying just that. The second is that the disdain for the working class is so common in the political class that they assume wide segments of the population are simply racist and nationalistic, legitimizing those tendencies. Their approach takes a battle over the country's economic management and turns it into a cultural war.

We’re on a perilous path. Countries that have almost zero immigration, like the Czech Republic and Poland, are using immigrants as a way to stir up nationalistic sentiment. In Greece, the Golden Dawn has now a solid base of about 400,000 voters to build on. And on the other side of the Atlantic, Donald Trump is providing a platform for hatred and frustration that is then turned on rival politicians, journalists and activists.

We shouldn’t hesitate to point out and condemn political opportunism when we see it, especially when it comes to nationalism and immigration. And we should stop being surprised at the results of nationalism and xenophobia in Europe. If we allow irresponsible populists to fan the fires of hatred, the results are sadly predictable.

Yiannis Baboulias is a journalist based between London and Athens. His work has been featured in Al Jazeera English & America, Ch4 News, Vice, the LRB and Newsweek among others.

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Spanish diplomat

I suscribe 100% to what this article says.
I regret, however, that it fails to mention than we now live in Western countries under the dual menace of rightwing populism and leftwing populism.
Greece, by the way, has already fallen to the demagogues and incompetent leftwing populists of Syriza, who had made life much difficult for the average Greek by defying facts and logic last year and stirring nationalism, populism and myth. Spain’s Podemos want to do just that. Podemos is a political movement whose leadership has learned politics in Venezuela, from they have got financing (and from Iran, as well). They are populists leftwingers covered under a sheep’s skin, pretending to be socialdemocrats or whatever they find useful in order to fool the, sorry to say, mllions of idiots who will vote for them.

Posted on 6/18/16 | 1:13 PM CET

No Excuses

By the same logic, we should stop being surprised at the results of Islamism and occidentophobia as well. Since Orlando, the victims of Islamism outnumber those of far right extremism (even in the report cited, Islamist attacks make much more victims). We should blame the far-right for their terrorists but also blame the Islamists for their terrorists (though an Al Jazeera journalist like the author probably won’t dare make this point).

Also, blaming rhetoric without citing actual incitations to violence sounds hollow. Where is the moral equivalent of the Orlando imam saying that “death is the sentence” for homosexuality “out of compassion”?

Posted on 6/18/16 | 1:50 PM CET

Tom Cullem

And, of course, no blame whatsoever attaches to governments who refused to listen to the electorates who asked that mass immigration be slower and better controlled, or to the preservation of culture, or the utter contempt in which governments held the wishes of their electorates, or the EU for galloping toward ever closer union despite clear signs that that most electorates weren’t interested in doing that . . .

Nation states confer benefits as well as disadvantages. The wholesale naked forcing of electorates to accept forced social engineering whether they liked it or not, fed nationalism instead of healthy nation-statehood. For the left, there is nothing in between.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. A bit of compromise on both sides might have kept the dialogue moderated.

The EU has got to start listening to nation states. Even if REMAIN wins on Thursday, the divisiveness that the EU’s utter lack of adaptability and creeping imperialism has sowed is not going to go away.

Posted on 6/18/16 | 10:24 PM CET

Veritas

When mental illness tips into violence would be a more suitable headline!!